N-weapons gone by 2000?

Press, 17 January 1986, Page 6

N-weapons gone by 2000?

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The leader of the Soviet Union, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, has proposed a threestage plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons by the year 2000 and announced that Moscow’s unilateral nuclear test moratorium will be extended for a further three months. Western diplomats said Mr Gorbachev’s statement, which was read on State television yesterday drew together existing Soviet positions and was aimed at maintaining the impetus created by his summit conference with President Reagan in November. Stage one would also include “the adoption and im-

piementation of the decision on the complete elimination of intermediate-range missiles of the U.S.S.R. and the United States in the European zone,” he said. Diplomats said this wording would have to be studied as it was not clear whether Mr Gorbachev was redefining United States cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe as intermediate. The Kremlin has classified them as strategic because they can reach Soviet territory but Washington rejects this formulation.

Mr Gorbachev said that during the second stage of the programme, to start no later than 1990 and to run for five to seven years, other nuclear powers would

begin to disarm. Last October, France and Britain rejected an offer from Mr Gorbachev for separate talks with the Soviet Union aimed at agreeing on limits to their independent nuclear arsenals.

The diplomats said Mr Gorbachev had apparently taken this refusal into account by deferring arms cuts by other States to stage two.

This phase would also produce a multilateral accord prohibiting space weapons which all industrial powers would be obliged to sign, Mr Gorbachev said. The third stage, beginning no later than 1995, would

see the final elimination of all remaining nuclear weapons.

“A universal accord will be drawn up that such weapons should never again come into being,” he said.

Mr Gorbachev then announced that Moscow’s freeze on nuclear tests would continue for three more months in spite of Washington’s refusal to join it.

The Kremlin announced last July that it would suspend all test explosions from August 6 to the end of 1985 and later offered to extend the moratorium if the United States followed suit but the Reagan Administration declined.